


the end

by TheSweetestTart



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29940558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSweetestTart/pseuds/TheSweetestTart
Summary: His monstrous blade clattered to the ground with a deafening sound-- and then all was quiet.
Kudos: 5





	the end

The light tore through him like it tore through any wraith.

His monstrous blade clattered to the ground with a deafening sound-- and then all was quiet. 

Senna didn’t know why, but as he fell back, she was drawn to him. In a single swift motion, she caught him, and she was surprised to find that he had weight at all. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting. Perhaps she had expected him to slip through her fingers like the Mist that poured from that gaping hole in his chest, or for the touch of him to burn her like acid, like fire. Yet in her grasp, she felt his skin, long cold, but soft, the barest give beneath her fingers. 

Something clicked in her mind, as she sunk to her knees, his thin frame in her grasp, draped across her lap limply. His throat bobbed with a hoarse sound, his grey lips parted, choking on the same Mist that comprised him, that poured from his heart. His eyes, drenched black, were wide with the shock of what had happened to him, the pain of it. Her heart...panged with sympathy. Wraiths were creatures despised by most, if not all people. Senna couldn’t blame them, not entirely. They were the harbingers of despair, the spectres of death, the enemy of all things good. Senna had fought them for all her life.

The Ruined King had been many things to many people. He was a force of nature that drained the life of anything and anyone he touched-- the face of fear itself, the very manifestation of the word cruelty, yet so far beyond it that the word failed to describe him. He had been a spoiled brat, despised by his own courtiers; a second son, expected to live his life in ease and contentment, quietly forgotten. He had been a husband, a lover so complete in his affections that the world only existed in periphery to his wife. He had been all of those things, at different times-- all at once. In that web of contradictions, he had been so awfully terribly human.

“Easy. Easy now.” Senna murmured, “It’s over.” 

“Over…?” He echoed, “It-- cannot be over. I cannot--”

He spoke those words, but neither of them believed it, even as his clawed fingers gripped his truly fatal wound-- where his pale body had begun to dissipate, that hand trying in vain to keep it from happening. Like he had done for so many years, the young king of Camavor knew nothing but to deny the truth. His breath came short, uneven, the pain like a vice about his ribs, each breath only serving to tighten it. His eyes darted this way and that, as if searching. Searching for something-- an answer, help, hope. Senna watched the emotions pass through his face, through those big green eyes-- the anger, the fear, the sorrow-- and finally, a hollowness. She’d seen it many times before, on many different faces.

Senna’s hand found the base of his skull, tangled in white curls, her thumb brushing along his jaw. Their eyes met wordlessly as the Mist began to die out, the pale golden rays of the sun piercing through it. Morning. Something about her touch seemed to draw him from his panic, grounding him. For the first time, she looked into his face and he seemed...lucid. A change, subtle, in those green eyes that she knew so painfully matched her own. 

Senna wanted badly to hate him. He had hurt Lucian-- hurt the world. He was the reason her life had been the way it was. It was from that rotten, black heart of his that the Mist poured forth endlessly. How many lives had he ruined? How many people had he killed? She should’ve hated him. She should’ve leveled the barrel of that gun to his head and erased the memory of him forever from the face of Runeterra. Someone might’ve called that justice.

But she couldn’t. 

Looking at him, she couldn’t bring herself to hate him. He was small in her grasp, almost boyish. In his face, no longer disfigured by agony and hatred, she saw a man even younger than she was, with sensitive features and a handsome brow. She saw where the corners of his mouth had once borne laughter lines. She saw a man who never had any choice in his life but for who he loved-- and he clung to that love so fiercely that it destroyed him. She saw him in ways he couldn’t even remember himself being, for that pain had twisted him far beyond anyone’s recognition, let alone his own. 

Senna looked in that soft face and saw Lucian. She saw the path he had been on in his obsessive hunt for the Chain Warden. The way his light, his innocence, had been marred into something unrecognizable in his fury and grief. She knew it well-- but Lucian hadn’t been lost to it. He was a stronger man than that, she said to herself; Yet, in some other world, in some other place, if she had never been freed from the lantern, would Lucian have been the same way? She...can’t be sure. The thought agonized her, the doubt of the man she cherished. But that pain was the price she paid for her compassion-- and she wouldn’t give that up, no matter what.

And so she smiled, weary, down at her fallen foe.

“I know how you feel,” She said, “I’m here with you. You can let go.”

Viego blinked slowly, brows threaded. He heard her words, but could not process them. The very idea of it was foreign to him. His grudge, his quest for Isolde-- it had become one and the same with him, with his very being. There was no Viego without those feelings. Yet those words were like drops of water on thin parchment, melting through him. He saw the sense in them. Perhaps he was too tired to deny it any longer.

“How could you know how I feel?” He asked softly, tears slipping down over his cheeks. In the light of the sun, they almost felt warm. But that...couldn’t be true, he knew. The warmth of life had been long struck from his accursed body.

“You’ll just have to trust me.” She said in return, her lip lifting crookedly. Was it funny? Had he said something strange? Should he be angry? He had been angry for so long he had forgotten what anything else felt like. He thought he should be angry. But instead he felt something...lift off of him. He laughed, a quiet croaking chuckle, even as tears fell. That humor reminded him of something, of someone, someone who was far away from him now. 

It reminded him of her. More than anything he had found her in, more than the trinkets or the shattered memories. Isolde had always had a way of cutting through him. He was...dramatic, he always had been-- but Isolde was practical. If he was being ridiculous, she told him so, but always with that softness, that smile, that affection. So long he had spent desperate to recall her features, and always he was unable to. She was wrong each time he tried, and every failed attempt only drove the thorns deeper into his heart. She had looked nothing like this woman, the Sentinel of Light-- Senna. He remembered that. But in her face, with that smile, those eyes warm with compassion, her visage wreathed by the radiance of the morning sun, as she took his hand in her’s, he felt as though he saw something of Isolde, a fragment of something true and whole. And for once, the memory of her didn’t freeze his blood in agony, didn’t rend him with the knowledge of her death. 

His chest swelled with warmth, with sweetness, even as his vision darkened and faded. Her name was like a chorus, the most wonderful song that had even been sung, a miracle. 

Isolde. 

A hand raised up to brush along Senna’s cheek as though she were the most precious thing in the world. Her heart ached for the intimacy of it. She knew that gesture, that touch, was not for her. But she raised her hand to meet his nonetheless, resting her cheek into the touch. For a moment, he had found what he so terribly wanted. And that moment was his last. He exhaled a breath like a sigh of relief-- and his porcelain form faded like the Mist before it. Her fingers slipped through his as they turned to nothing in her grasp, and a sob caught in her throat as a wall broke down within her, not sorrow nor happiness nor relief nor hatred, but all at once, flowing in circles and circles.

**Author's Note:**

> i just love viego a lot and i love senna a lot and i would love if they got to properly interact...


End file.
